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CONTENTS
- a natural rebel
- opposing war
- opposing conscription
- first imprisonments
- hard labour
- breaking the rules
- opposing the prison system
- ‘No More War’
- onset of war
- anti-war, anti-Nazi
- war work
- aftermath
- the Cold War
- working to the end
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First imprisonments
But in July 1916 Fenner Brockway was in court again, and this time he was sent to prison, the first of several stretches. This was for publishing anti-conscription leaflets. In November he was arrested again, and this time it was personal: as a conscientious objector he had been offered exemption from military service on condition that he did work of ‘national importance’ to help the war effort. He had refused, and now was forcibly handed over to the army. On the way to the barracks under escort, Fenner Brockway suggested that he take the two soldiers out to lunch - it turned out that it was the birthday of one of them (‘the best I ever had!’ said the ex-navvy after tucking into a huge meal). But Fenner Brockway spent a night in the Tower of London as a traitor.
It was a bad night, too: a group of soldiers kept him awake with verbal abuse and threats. In the morning, an officer ordered him to ‘fall in’ with the other men: ‘You’re in the army now!’ But Fenner Brockway politely refused, saying he would not obey any military order. The officer barked ‘You’re for the cells!’ and left.
Then came a surprise: the ordinary soldiers gathered round Fenner Brockway, laughing. ‘Told the Colonel off proper!’ ‘Not a coward, anyhow.’ Then they began to listen to his explanation of why he was a ‘conchie’. ‘Some of them were hearing the socialist case against war for the first time.’ On the way to prison in Chester, where Fenner Brockway was to await court martial, his escort allowed him to chat with NCF members picketing the Tower, agreed that Lilla Brockway could travel with him - and even escorted her to where she was staying, before taking her husband on to the barracks.
His experiences in Chester Castle prison weren’t easy, but, he said, ‘they were easy compared with those of the COs who had been imprisoned in the first days of conscription’: he suffered no physical violence, and was not forcibly made to wear uniform. He also recorded that after that unhappy night in the Tower he never again received any abuse from soldiers.
And it was in Chester that he first met a frail young CO, who looked amazed when Fenner greeted him as friend. ‘Are you a conchie too?’ he asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Are there many?’ ‘Six thousand.’ ‘Six thousand! I thought I was almost the only one.’
Hard labour
The court martial was ‘as good as a pantomime’. The room was tiny, and crowded with journalists. The three army officers conducting the trial ‘were new to their job and didn’t know a thing about it’. They stared at their copy of the Military Regulations, baffled by its complexity. Fenner Brockway, however, knew it well, and was able to conduct them through its pages - ‘it became a case of a prisoner conducting his own trial’. Fenner Brockway’s defence statement was widely reported in the papers and reprinted as a popular leaflet. But there was no way he could win the case. Three days later his sentence was announced: six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. Fenner Brockway was locked up in Wormwood Scrubs.
This was a kind of imprisonment new to him. No letters or visits. Bread-and-water punishments. Sewing 70 feet of mailbags a day. Outdoor manual work in tough weather conditions. When Lilla Brockway was finally allowed to visit (just once), she brought their 18-month-old daughter with her, and the meeting took place in cubicles separated by strong wire mesh. ‘I can still see,’ Fenner Brockway wrote 25 years later, ‘the wondering eyes with which my daughter looked at her father in a cage.’
As far as the army was concerned he was still a conscripted soldier. When he had finished his jail sentence, once again he refused to obey military orders, once again he was imprisoned for it. This time he was sent to Liverpool. He had entered the Scrubs in an exalted frame of mind: ‘I wasn’t in mental revolt against imprisonment. I was proud to undergo it as witness to anti-war beliefs.’ But he went to Walton jail defiantly, determined to ‘pit my wits against the authorities and defeat them if I could’.
Breaking the rules
One rule which Fenner Brockway and his fellow COs planned to overcome was ‘the silence rule’: prisoners were forbidden to communicate with each other in any way. This was a real hardship for many COs, lively articulate men who were hungry for talk, news, ideas and human contact. The first step was the NCF’s bright idea: the men smuggled in pencil leads, taped to the underside of their feet where they didn’t show even when the prisoners stripped naked for compulsory showers on arrival at the jail. (There was a nasty moment when a warder noticed that Fenner Brockway’s feet seemed to be turning the shower water purple, but the man put it down to too much disinfectant.) With the leads, prisoners could write messages on fragments of toilet paper (not the soft stuff available nowadays). One of the first notes provided the code which the prisoners used to tap out messages along the water pipes running through the cells. And one of the first messages tapped out to Fenner Brockway was ‘Welcome’.
True to his character, he began organising and editing a prison newspaper. The ‘Walton Leader’ had 40 toilet paper pages covered (using capital letters so that his handwriting wasn’t revealed) with news, articles, jokes, a Letters Page, and cartoons (the cartoonist went on to work for a national paper after the war). Each issue of the ‘Walton Leader’ was smuggled from cell to cell with the help of a sympathetic non CO prisoner. A major news item in one issue was the Russian Revolution. In another an ‘exclusive’ was a survivor’s account of the slaughter at Passchendaele: this graphically described ‘the ruthless, machine-like way the generals sent in wave after wave of thousands of men to be massacred’. The ‘free’ press outside the prison were banned from printing the story.
Imprisonment was tough on all the inmates. ‘We were treated like animals without minds or personality.’ Sensual deprivation was painful. ‘One day I saw a few blades of grass growing between two slabs of stone in the exercise yards. Young and green, they excited me like wine. I feasted my eyes on them each day.’ But then a working party scoured the yard and the grass had gone. Fenner Brockway wept.
When his time in Walton was up, he yet again refused to accept military authority. This time he was sentenced to 2 years hard labour. The sentence was announced in front of 3,000 soldiers lined up on a parade ground. ‘I shall be proud to do it,’ he told the officers, loud enough for the soldiers to hear, and the lines of men ‘seemed to shiver with shock’.
Opposing the prison system
This time it was Chester Castle again. Now the COs were in a mood to protest not only against military authority but also against the prison regime: ‘it, too, was destructive of all that was best in human personality’. In 1918 some improvements were made in the lot of those imprisoned for more than a year: they could have books sent in, and for 40 minutes each day they could talk to one other prisoner during exercise. But the sense of ‘mind and spirit being crushed’ remained. Because the CO prisoners had a feeling of fellowship with each other, were supported by the strength of their resistance to war, and were not inclined to crime, Fenner Brockway began to think it was the duty of COs to change the prison system. A disciplined revolt against prison rules began. Its leaders devised a sensible timetable, allowing for conversation, lectures, and even concerts - given through the cell windows to what was indeed a captive audience. The rebellion lasted a heady 10 days, and then its leaders were transferred; Fenner Brockway was now taken to Lincoln prison.
Here, of course, he continued his resistance, and was put on punishment diet for a month, until the medical officer said it had to stop (though Fenner Brockway received no treatment for the month’s harsh effects). Even when the war ended he wasn’t released: the sentence had to run its course. He finally left Lincoln in April 1919, having been in one prison or another for 28 months, the last 8 entirely in solitary confinement.
Yet he was able to say ‘I think our wives had a harder time than we prisoners did; they had to live in the middle of a war-mad world’ - and were often victimised for their anti-war views and for being married to a jailed ‘conchie’. Lilla Brockway had a little girl and a younger baby daughter to look after, living in hardship in a caravan. In the last 8 months she had no news of Fenner at all - except for one letter smuggled out of Lincoln with the help of friendly Irish prisoners. (One of them was Eamonn de Valera, a future prime minister of Ireland).
‘The finale of my war-time experiences came a few weeks after leaving Lincoln. The postman brought a buff envelope with On His Majesty’s Service printed bold and black. Inside was a form from the War Office recording that I had been discharged from the army, and stating that my behaviour had been so bad that if I ever attempted to join the army again I would be subject to a sentence of 2 years’ imprisonment with hard labour. The War Office certainly had no sense of humour.’
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